I went back to bed and fell asleep.
“Annie didn’t remember a thing,” Emily said. “When I told her the story, she thought I was making it up and asked me to stop. It really scared her.”
“I imagine that would be scary,” I said, “telling her that she’d fallen into a hole and died.”
“For decades, I thought it was nothing but a terrifying dream. I didn’t mention it to you back then, because I didn’t believe for a second that you and I had actually shared the same dream.”
“Why would you?” I said. “It’s impossible.”
“The following morning, Annie told my parents what I’d described and that I was scaring her. They pulled me into their bedroom and shut the door. This was the first time they asked me about false memories—dreams that felt so real part of me believed they’d happened in real life. I told them what had happened, and they nodded and listened. I don’t know how to explain it, but something told me they believed that what I’d described happening to Annie in the black well may have actually happened—and not in a dream, but in real life.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“It was just something in the way they looked at me as I was describing the events of the dream. And…”
“What?”
“When I told them that you were there, in the dream, their faces changed. They were scared like I’ve never seen them. And there was something else.”
“What?”
“A few days later, I overheard my parents speaking with a man in our kitchen. They told him about the memory I’d described, and he said that he believed I might have some kind of special ability, something they’d been looking for. My parents did their best to smile and nod politely, but I could tell they were worried, and that the fact that this man was saying these things might mean something extremely bad.”
“What happened after that?”
“Nothing, really. Everything went back to normal. I didn’t think about that conversation again until years later.”
“What made you think about it again?”
“The man from that conversation showed up at my apartment.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me he knew my parents from way back when, and that he wanted to make me an offer of employment. It was more money than I’d ever seen in my life. I told him I’d think about it. The next day I was working for him.”
“Crow.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Fucking Crow.”
“What happened?”
“At first, things were good. I believed that he really was working to make things better. I helped him track down discrepancies, patterns, and coincidences, and uncover some of the complex pathways he was looking for.”
“But wait, so what happened with our parents and Gatewick? What eventually shut it down?”
“Our parents and a few others expressed their concerns, and Worricker himself shut down the project. It wasn’t until after Hawk Worricker’s death that Crow insisted on revisiting that avenue of research.”
“And what happened when Crow started things up again?”
“Do you remember Natalie?”
“Kind of,” I said. I’d met her once or twice, but I didn’t really know her. “She was a bit older, around your age.”
“Natalie was Crow’s daughter. He was working with her to try to detect one of Meechum’s Radiants, but when Natalie received the news that a friend of hers had died in a car accident, something happened. Crow believed his daughter’s ensuing emotional distress resulted in her inadvertently causing an interdimensional slip, which led to her disappearance.
“None of us ever saw her again.”
* * *
—
Now that Emily had mentioned it, I remembered Natalie going missing, but it had happened while my family was away in Europe for the summer, and by the time we came back, talk about Natalie’s disappearance had faded.
“When Crow recruited me, I believed he was sincere about wanting to improve the world, that he was using Natalie’s death to inspire his working toward genuine positive change, but any good that came of our work back then was simply a side effect of his actual goal, which was trying to bring his daughter back.”
“Couldn’t he just slip into a universe where an instance of her might still exist?”
“That was the first thing he tried—multiple times—but Natalie was never there.”